Colin,

I’m more and more aware everyday that the planet is changing and that I’m contributing to that change in a negative way (i.e. the climate). After seeing the Minimalism documentary with you and Joshua and Ryan, I’ve started to become a minimalist myself, which I believe will help, and I’ve been a vegan for several years.

I guess I’m hoping you can tell me what else I can do to change course so that I’m not causing as much environmental damage and so that I can help other people in my life make positive changes, too.

-Leigh

—

Hey Leigh-

I’m going to give you a ground-level, practical answer, and a more nuanced, somewhat-more-depressing answer, because I think both are important ways of looking at this sort of thing.

The practical answer is that minimalism absolutely helps, because it’s a means of redefining one’s relationship with stuff, and with consumption more broadly. And if we can consume more intentionally—not buying nothing, but buying the right things for us and our priorities and no more than that—then we can slowly reorient the economy toward producing less of better, which may in turn help alleviate some of our immense over-expenditure of energy and creation of waste.

To be clear: possessions aren’t bad, and there’s no single correct number of things to own. It’s not ideal to hate stuff, because some stuff is magical and can make your life better. Just spend more of your time, energy, and resources (including money) getting the right stuff, and then stop there—don’t buy things because someone else wants you to, because you’re being told you’re incomplete without a particular jacket or car, or because it’s been implied your entire life you need to accumulate certain things at different stages of life.

Minimalism is about purposeful consumption, and we all have different purposes: so figure out who you are and what you want to do with yourself, and allow that to guide you in this regard.

Veganism is similar to minimalism in that I think it, or something like it, can absolutely be part of the solution for many people.

I do think that it gets a bad rap because a lot of people become a bit evangelical when they adopt this and other diets (the same is often true with minimalism, actually) and the subsequent proselytization can come across as judgey and turn people off of the concept. Which is something to keep in mind, if and when you decide to share your enthusiasm for this particular lifestyle choice with others: very often living a good life and allowing others to come to you for information when they see the benefits of that life will be more convincing than foisting it upon others, unasked.

That said, there’s some good data out there that implies even minor adjustments to our meat consumption habits are a good idea if we want to reduce overall resource-usage, and because of what the production of said meat does to the environment.

(This is alongside the many other reasons a person might eat less or no meat, including health and morality arguments; but I won’t get into those here, as they’re not on-topic.)

To these steps that you’ve already taken, I’d add that, like with minimalism, it’s a good idea to step back and assess how you live to see what’s vital and what’s superfluous, and see what else you might adjust to reach your intended ends.

This is something I’ve been sorting out for myself, recently, as it’s become increasingly obvious that regular, petroleum-fueled transportation (very much including flying) is less than ideal. And although you could argue that flying commercial (as opposed to traveling in a private plane) can actually be more efficient than comparable types of transportation, you could also argue that a lot of airline travel needn’t take place to begin with. The ability to travel the way we do, today, is a beautiful, at times vital thing. But so is the ability to get anything we want shipped to us from anywhere in the world in a day or two—that doesn’t mean we should abuse this power.

For me, as someone who loves to travel, this recognition has meant being more careful with how often I fly each year, and doing my best to batch my travels so that I can fly to a particular continent, and then meander around overland using primarily mass-transit while there.

This is more doable for me than it is for many other people, because I tend to have more time available for each trip, and I tend to enjoy overland travel. But that’s the point: like with consumption and diet, the solutions here, too, will be very different for each of us based on our lifestyles, priorities, and relative capabilities in terms of streamlining and making adjustment.

Some people will need to fly more often than others because there are no real alternatives, while others may be able to sub in alternatives for their most resource-consuming activities nearly 100% of the time. For most of us, we’ll be able to do barely anything in some cases, and a whole lot, in others.

Recognizing this is important, I think, as more people will be able and willing to make minor adjustments to their lives, especially if they’re not feeling pressured or compelled to give up something vital in the trade-off. And just as it’s arguably a lot more valuable (in terms of raw numbers) to get a million people to eat meat only six days a week instead of every day, than it is for a few hundred people to stop eating meat entirely, it’s also arguably more valuable to get a million people to make a handful of small changes to their lives than it is to convert a few dozen people into environmental absolutists.

All that said, the less practical but arguably still important perspective on this situation is to recognize that a few billion people could make environmentally thoughtful changes to their lives and still not have the impact on the environment that just 100 fossil fuel companies have each year.

Of course, if you really want to cut back, the US military, all by itself, pollutes more than all of Portugal; if it were a country, the US military would be 55th on the list of the most polluting nations in the world.

So if we got really serious about reducing our emissions, we would probably start with our militaries—and the US military is bigger, in terms of spending, than the next largest/spendiest nine or ten countries on the list, combined, so it would be an excellent place to start.

But unfortunately, the ability of the average person to influence not just fossil fuel companies’ operations, but also the operations of a given country’s military, is quite limited.

This is why I would argue that, although there’s plenty we can do on an individual basis, and that we should consider doing whenever feasible, it’s almost certainly more valuable, all told, for each of us to vote—with ballots and with our wallets—in such a way that we adjust the far larger-scale behaviors of these entities.

This is not something that any of us can do in isolation, but we do have the ability to create incentives that cause companies to change their ways, and many of us have the ability to elect leaders who will at least attempt to change the status quo in some meaningful way, creating even more potent incentives for corporations from their place in office, and potentially adjusting the composition and nature of the relevant military, as well.

This shouldn’t imply that we don’t all have an individual, ground-level role to play here, as well. As our norms and behaviors change, so too changes the marketplace, our political landscape, and our understanding of what’s possible.

But recognizing which actions are meant to move the needle, and which are meant to influence the people and things that move the needle, is useful. Keeping that distinction in mind can help us remember why we’re applying our efforts in a particular direction, and what we hope to achieve with each step we take in a particular direction.